Wounds can heal without scars on the skin

Scarless wound healing of the skin

Thanks to medical advances, wounds, for example after surgery, no longer leave scars that are too great. But is also a scarless wound healing possible? The German researchers want to find out now.

Home remedies for the treatment of simple wounds

For minor injuries, it is often sufficient to stick a plaster on the wound. In addition, some home remedies can help. So it is often recommended to try salt, because salt water accelerates wound healing. Others are more likely to treat wounds with fresh garlic. And for superficial, slightly oozing and less bleeding wounds, zinc can help to heal better. Scarring can not be prevented by such methods. But is it even possible for wounds to heal without scarring? This question is answered by a German research project.

Injuries and surgeries often leave unpleasant scars on the skin. But is also a scarless wound healing possible? That's what a research project wants to find out. (Image: Artem Furman / fotolia.com)

Regeneration of tissues and organs

The regeneration of tissues and organs has fascinated people for millennia. "It is all the more remarkable that the processes are still relatively poorly understood," explains Dr. Yuval Rinkevich from Helmholtz Zentrum München in a statement.

However, the head of the junior research group "Cellular Therapeutics in Chronic Lung Disease" at the Institute of Lung Biology of the Helmholtz Zentrum München, together with his team, was recently able to contribute significant aspects to this field.

"We were able to show that the connective tissue cells of the skin responsible for wound healing do not represent a uniform population," says Rinkevich.

"According to our findings, there are four different types of these so-called fibroblasts, whose composition is responsible for how strong or weak a wound scarred."

Number of regenerative cells decreases

As an example, the researcher adds: "If the skin of a developing embryo is injured, it simply reproduces. In later stages of life, however, the wounds scarred. "

Scientists have recently shown that this phenomenon is due to the different composition of fibroblasts in the skin:

Accordingly, the number of regenerative cells decreases over the course of development, while conversely, more scar-forming cells are added.

However, when the researchers transplanted mouse embryo fibroblasts into corresponding wound regions of adult animals, scarring was significantly reduced.

Strategies to prevent scarring

This results for Dr. med. Rinkevich also the task of the coming years: "We want to understand with new experimental approaches, how this scarless wound healing works and then rebuild this process in the long term clinically."

As part of the "ScarLessWorld" project, he and his team plan the following sub-aspects:

fully catalog the different fibroblast types,
record their dynamics during wound healing with imaging methods,
identify the genes responsible for regeneration or scarring and
ultimately, translate these findings into human skin tissue.

"With the technologies we have developed, we can succeed in this breakthrough. That would be a big step forward for regenerative medicine, "says Rinkevich.

Because currently there are hardly any strategies in clinical practice to prevent scarring, for example, in larger wounds or burns.

If proven, he may also be able to adapt to other conditions, such as lung fibrosis, in which the lung tissue is scarred. (Ad)